Take advantage of the phenomenon that is quickly becoming the most effective way to market brands, products, and services - social media. This easy-to-understand book introduces you to blogging, Twitter, social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, social news and bookmarking sites, forums, opinion and review sites, and virtual worlds. You'll learn how these technologies work and how other people are using them, so you can determine which ones might work for marketing your business or organization. Ideal for marketing and PR professionals, web developers, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in this new marketing arena, "The Social Media Marketing Book" helps you plan and execute strategies with actionable advice every step of the way. Learn the techniques necessary to measure results and track return on investment. This book will change you from a social media newbie into a knowledgeable and discriminating user. Make sense of this complicated environment with the help of screenshots, graphs, and visual explanations. Learn the history and culture of each social media type, including features, functionality, and protocols.
Get non-technical explanations of the methods you need to engage each media type. Set specific goals for your campaigns and evaluate them according to key performance indicators. Choose the technologies and marketing tactics most relevant to your campaign goals. Understand social web jargon used by customers as well as marketers.
The introductions to all these social networking sites were extremely basic. Since this books is meant to be more than an introduction to social media, I was rather disappointed. How to engage social media for the purposes of marketing wasn't even the main focus of the book. It came across more as an afterthought. Doesn't help that this book is almost 5 years old.
Those who engage in social media even for private purposes will hardly learn anything new through this book. Engaging with social media will teach a lot more about the ins and outs of it than this book does. Due to the limited marketing spin involved, there's little extra value as well.
Personally, I think this book is only useful for those who don't engage with social media at all. Even then, it's probably more helpful to look for a book that has been published more recently. After all, most tech books are already outdated the moment they hit the shelves.
